wreath-making

Last weekend I got together with a few friends to make festive wreaths. This meant an early start (which always seems worse on a Saturday somehow!) to head down to the flower markets to get supplies.

To say we went overboard would be an understatement. The words ‘kid’ and ‘candy shop’ spring to mind, except imagine four definitely grown-up women losing their marbles over three bunches for $10. Yep. We literally had to wedge ourselves in the car with flowers and greens stuffed around our legs and on our laps.

Flower-geddon, as it shall now be known, was followed by a very necessary breakfast and coffee break.
One of the girls has a lovely garden so we laid out a few beach towels, threw all the flowers in the middle and got to work. Now there are are already approximately 7,434,613,059 wreath tutorials online so I thought I would share a few tips instead.

– Try to get to a flower market for supplies. This will keep costs down considerably, and you will have a lot more choice. Look for a market that supplies to florists, they are usually open to the public on weekends.

– Choose a nice-looking wreath base. We had some natural grapevine wreath bases – these are pretty anyway, so you don’t have to cover every inch. The base could be worked into the design of the wreath, making it more versatile.

– Have some floral wire ready to secure larger stems. The grapevine bases are very dense, so you can poke stems straight into them and they stay put – the wire is handy for anything that is too heavy or feels a bit loose.

– Flowers that will dry nicely, or are already dried will prolong the life of your wreath. Native Australian flowers and leaves (eucalyptus, kangaroo paw, flannel flower etc) are perfect for this. Californian natives would also work really well. As well as natives we used holly, evergreen branches, lavender and dried seed pods.

– If you want to include fresh flowers, use them sparingly so that you can remove them when they die and still be left with a gorgeous dried wreath.

– Make a small half-wreath by wrapping a length of wire with floral tape, and securing the flowers with more floral tape. Make a tiny loop with the wire at each end and thread ribbon through. Bend the wire into an arc.

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9 Comments

Super pretty! I always hear of flower market adventures on blogs but perhaps I’m too much of a night owl (read: not a morning person) to make it happen 😛 I love the last one how it has touches of gold leaves too 🙂